Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

My annoyance is that it sounds like I can't just use Claude Code directly in XCode? I like how Zed does it, it's not perfect, but it works really nicely.

CharlesW2• 6 months ago

Xcode is using the Claude Agent SDK, which means that you "get the full power of Claude Code directly in Xcode—including subagents, background tasks, and plugins—all without leaving the IDE¹". I assume that means iOS development plug-ins like Axiom² should work as well.

¹ https://www.anthropic.com/news/apple-xcode-claude-agent-sdk ² https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/

giancarlostoro2• 6 months ago

But via my Claude Code usage or via the API usage?

cap10morgan• 6 months ago

I am already using Claude in Xcode 26.2. What did they change / add specifically in 26.3? It's not super clear behind the marketing haze.

Someone• 6 months ago

FTA: “In addition to these built-in integrations, Xcode 26.3 makes its capabilities available through the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that gives developers the flexibility to use any compatible agent or tool with Xcode.”

There may be other improvements.

dd8601fn• 6 months ago

I tried the three provider types with xcodes current agent integration pane and just trying to use them crashed xcode itself so badly that the ide couldn’t even be launched.

etothet• 6 months ago

I came here to ask this question. I find the existing agentic coding integraton to be clunky and slow. I've had much better luck with my Xcode projects just using my agentic coding tool of choice in the CLI.

OGEnthusiast• 6 months ago

I wonder how much of the recent Apple OS releases were done with "agentic coding".

spzb• 6 months ago

UI design clearly was done by a chatbot.

verdverm• 6 months ago

spray those menu icons everywhere

radicaldreamer3• 6 months ago

According to Mark Gurman (Bloomberg Apple beat reporter), Apple “runs on Claude.” https://x.com/tbpn/status/2016911797656367199?s=61

gbriel• 6 months ago

"custom versions of Claude"

richrichardsson• 6 months ago

That makes sense. The latest Sequoia update can't understand it's done updating and shows the "welcome" message every time I boot. I won't upgrade to Tahoe until absolutely necessary. It's like Apple is doing everything in its power to alienate their users.

k_bx• 6 months ago

When I see Activity Monitor that doesn't show tabs until you nearly go full screen – all I can think is that this shit product was built even before vibecoding was a thing. Truly ahead of its time.

OsamaJaber• 6 months ago

MCP support is the real story here Means you're not locked into Claude or Codex Can plug in whatever agent you want

geooff_4• 6 months ago

100% I hope they open more of the tooling to MCP, Xcode Instruments with real MCP support would be huge.

RobMurray6• 6 months ago

Just a good CLI would be even better, usable by humans, CI scripts and agents.

mrtesthah• 6 months ago

Was surprised they use MCP for this and not ACP.

zombot3• 6 months ago

plug in whatever agent you want

Noob question: Does that include local models?

vaxman3• 6 months ago

Only theoretically at this point, though they will tend to speak confidently enough about such untested capabilities so as to cause millions in investment losses to others. One would think a hardware manufacturer that's teetering on the abyss would go full out and implement a vLLM interface (maybe a folder of local models that can be downloaded as components in the Xcode-way and also a router too), but their NIH mentality has them tripping over their own Graydey's. There is nothing special about Apple Silicon except the head start they had and that they're squandering.

drak0n1c• 6 months ago

Unfortunately the MCP for external agent tools is flawed at the moment, it returns a format differing from its stated schema. So it doesn't work with OpenCode.

vaxman3• 6 months ago

Classic Apple; cannot possibly be the same developers (not) doing this kind of thing after all these years, so it must be a systemic issue.

anonutah• 6 months ago

Took some digging but finally found the docs on setting up MCP for external agents like Codex and Claude Code.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/giving-agent...

flohofwoe2• 6 months ago

Building castles in the sky while the foundation is rotting away :/ Xcode really needs a couple of years of pure bugfix and optimization releases instead of hype-chasing.

emchammer• 6 months ago

A lot of macOS needs that. There are some terrific ideas under the hood, but it’s as if people left halfway through implementing them.

embedding-shape2• 6 months ago

It's a damn shame, the hardware is pretty amazing and I wish they just had like one person who cared about Linux working at Apple and then make a small promise to not rugpull Linux users.

briandw2• 6 months ago

True that Xcode needs yet another rebuild from scratch. If they forked it and abandoned the old project file and went with a swift first approach, could work. However adding support for Claude is still a huge win. Could lead the way to making the transition to a sane IDE possible / reasonable. This would require leadership that’s completely absent at the company.

embedding-shape2• 6 months ago

If they forked it and abandoned the old project file and went with a swift first approach, could work.

Ever attempted this before at a large company and had success with it? I think I can count four times so far in ~15 years where people attempted to rewrite something medium/large-scale from scratch around me, was a success once, although scope was drastically cut at the end so almost a stretch to call it a success.

vor_2• 6 months ago

Why would being "swift first" affect anything? Why do you assume Xcode isn't already full of Swift code?

brokencode• 6 months ago

Idk, I feel like these coding assistant features aren’t that hard to add, but can provide a lot of value to developers. Most or all popular IDEs now support similar features.

I don’t disagree that Apple could use a major focus on bug fixing across their platforms right now though.

WillAdams• 6 months ago

Yeah, I'd like to see another OS release like to Snow Leopard (10.6.x) which had as a prime focus simplification and so forth w/o adding many (any?) features.

egorfine3• 6 months ago

Bugfixes won't make shareholders happy while shoving AI down our throats will.

XenophileJKO• 6 months ago

So you're still in the anger phase?

doug_durham2• 6 months ago

In what way is "AI being shoved down you throat"? Did you think that SwiftUI was shoved down your throat? Did you think that CoreData was shoved down your throat. Perhaps develop a more nuanced critique.

gwking• 6 months ago

For the record, I started using Xcode before it was called that and people have said this almost every year since. As I recall there was a big hit to its quality when they converted it to obj-c’s short lived garbage collection, and it felt like it never got back to reliable after that.

Ryder123• 6 months ago

Ahhh ProjectBuilder...

andrekandre4• 6 months ago

  > converted it to obj-c’s short lived garbage collection

that was around xcode 4 iirc, that was when interface builder was ducktaped (or maybe i should say intermixed) with xcode (née project builder) to disastrous results in terms of performance... its never really recovered imo...

cosmic_cheese4• 6 months ago

A full rebuild might be throwing out the baby with the bath water. As someone who’s been using it since it was known as Project Builder, bugs seem mostly concentrated in the XIB/Storyboard editor (formerly known as a Interface Builder), SwiftUI live preview, and SwiftPM package resolve.

In a project with code-only UIKit, only a smattering of SwiftUI for small components, and minimal dependencies, Xcode isn’t too bad of an experience and I’d say comparable to and in some ways better than Android Studio (that localization XML editor, not mention Gradle… ugh).

sunnybeetroot• 6 months ago

Refactoring works half the time, Android Studio is much more stable for basic developer tooling.

allthetime• 6 months ago

Honest question.

I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points. They are definitely fixing bugs. I make software for iOS, macOS, car play, and apple watch.

Sure sometimes I've got to reset or clear a cache, but this has never stopped my day.

What is so horrible about XCode?

flohofwoe2• 6 months ago

My pain points are mostly in the CPU debugger (since I'm not using much of the actual "IDE features" of Xcode except the regular edit-compile-debug loop anyway.

Starting a 'cold' debug session into a UI application may take 10-ish seconds until applicationDidFinishLaunching is reached, and most of that time seems to be spent with loading the symbols for hundreds of framework DLLs which are loaded during application start (which I never even need because I can't step into system frameworks anyway) - and seriously, why are there even hundreds of system DLLs in a more or less hello-world-style Metal application with minimal UI? This problem seems to go back to the ancient times, but it gets worse and worse the bloatier macOS UI processes become (e.g. the more system frameworks they load at start).

The debugger variable view panel is so bare bones that it looks like it's ripped out straight from an 80's home computer monitor program.

When debug-stepping, the debugger frontend is quite often stuck for 10s of seconds at completely unpredictable places waiting for the debugger to respond (it feels like a timeout).

Step-debugging in general feels sluggish even compared to VSCode with lldb.

For comparison, VS2026 isn't exactly a lightweight IDE either, but debugging sessions start instantly, debug-stepping is immediate, and the CPU debugger is much more feature rich than Xcode's. While in Xcode, everything feels like it's been added as a checklist item, but then never actually used by the Xcode team (I do wonder what they're using to develop Xcode, I doubt that they are dogfooding their own work).

The one good and useful thing about Xcode is the Metal debugger though.

Eric_WVGG2• 6 months ago

Like you, I think that Xcode maybe gets a worse rap than it deserves, but it's also endlessly frustrating.

First, the performance is just bad. The responsiveness compared to apps like VSC or Panic’s Nova is night-and-day.

The attention given to the design of new features is piss-poor. Placing the AI functionality on the left sidebar makes no sense; all the other tools on the left are project management; the "let me run weird functions and interact with stuff" UIs like terminal, debug and logs are in the bottom panel. Or maybe a new tab in the main workspace area?

The SwiftUI preview canvas can't be floated as a separate window, making it all but useless on anything smaller than a 16" MBP (and only barely usable there). In fact, I think it might be impossible to use Xcode in multiple screens altogether…?

Old simulator versions and cache files hang around forever, you need a third-party app like DevCleaner just to keep your storage from filling with nonsense. Cryptic messages like "copying symbols to device"… clear-cache that doesn't seem to clear-cache, that stupid list UI for info.plist…

I never thought I'd have anything nice to say about PNPM package management, but you can always just delete `node_modules` and reinstall and count on things working. Swift package management is a cryptic mess, and their insistence on using a GUI instead of a basic JSON manifest just compounds it. Like the info.plist thing, a lot of Xcode is based on a developer UI philosophy from the Mac Classic days that has mostly been abandoned by the rest of the world.

Mostly, I think the vitriol surrounding Xcode is that Apple seems to think they're doing a good job; meanwhile their most ardent and adept users are insisting that they are not. Same boat as MacOS, really.

trinix9123• 6 months ago

Mostly the fact that for the past 10 years they've been adding new features but never finished them and taken the time to properly bugfix them along the way. Just a few I ran into recently:

- Interface Builder is stuck in early 2010s. Not only is the property panel missing half of options we now take for granted everywhere else (like corner radius), it also randomly won't read fonts in the current project, will crash the entire IDE if you Cmd-Z a big change (things like unembedding a view) and half the UI is still not rendered the way it will be on the phone. Yes, Swift UI exists, but most bigger apps are still XIBs and Storyboards and it's going to remain that way for quite some time.

- Autocomplete is a hit or miss. Very much like the mid-90s Microsoft IDEs where you'd get totally useless results until you've typed the whole line out already. It can be done well, look at AppCode.

- Syntax highlighting feels pretty much the same. Randomly flashes on and off, often doesn't highlight until return is pressed, takes a long time to load on large files etc.

- Git integration is by far the worst I've seen out of any IDE and I've seen many. I'd go as far as to say that SourceSafe integration in VB6 was done better. Just the whole layout, modal-on-modal returning to the first modal on an error in the second and so on. It's crashed when rebasing a few times too, I don't trust it with larger operations since.

- Documentation browser is this annoying little window with semi-useful search. But don't worry, the docs in there are useless anyways. I could go on and on about their approach to docs but maybe next time.

Don't even get me started on performance. Things like switching file tabs should be instant by now but there are still noticeable delays for larger files and IB screens. Plus there's now two kinds of tabs (app-level and file-level) to add to the mess.

ASalazarMX2• 6 months ago

I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points.

This means you've learned to work around its shortcomings. A decade ago I used to develop in PyCharm for websites, and Visual Studio .Net for desktop apps. Then I had to learn XCode for a mobile app.

It was a surreal experience, like going back ten years in UX, while at the same time dealing with a myriad of modern but artificial limitations and breaking changes that meant the app needed frequent housekeeping even when its features remained unchanged.

For a company that gets a huge part of its revenue on its oversized App Store tax, developers, and their tooling, should be one of their highest priorities IMO. Instead, we get Kafkaesque situations like "my app doesn't compile today... oh, I need to open my Apple Developer account in the browser and accept a new little change in their kilometric EULA that I always pretend I've read carefully". Things like this could be handled better.

Edit: I also had to learn Android Studio for another app, and the experience had less friction overall, but that could mean that I've also learned to work around the shortcomings of JetBrains IDEs. Google is undeniably more developer-friendly than Apple IMO, though.

semiinfinitely• 6 months ago

its almost tautological that a person who has been using xcode for 10 years would be incapable of seeing any flaws in it

bromuro• 6 months ago

I also enjoy working with XCode. It has glitches and it is a bit slow, but I love the look and feel and it I am positively inspired working with it.

indycliff• 6 months ago

There is barely anything wrong with Xcode. I'd rather it than the bloat that is Android Studio or Visual Code. Haters gonna hate. I also write apps for every Apple platform and really no complaints except I wouldn't mind a better Vim mode (it does however suffice!)

sgt• 6 months ago

I haven't been using Xcode continuously for that long. But I recall being a pleasure every time I use it. Except when it crashed occasionally, but that was luckily rare.

It sounds like OP doesn't like the way Xcode does things differently to other IDE's.

snarf21• 6 months ago

If nothing else, an update to the pbxproj file format would be life changing. Most of my time fighting git is dealing with project file merges.

st3fan• 6 months ago

It has become a meme to complain about Xcode. When I ask devs what they don't like about it it is usually very subjective or a misunderstanding. Take it all with a grain of salt. It is one of the most advanced and amazing IDEs out there IMO.

perplex• 6 months ago

Xcode is abysmal on a large codebase. Freezes constantly on operations. The most useful features stall the entire program, things like: test navigator, quick open files, debugger, etc..

But I agree that Xcode runs fine on small projects and recent version feel stable compare to past releases.

jbm• 6 months ago

I sometimes have to build code for the apple watch. Getting it to pair with XCode is incredibly frustrating and is the opposite of what you would expect.

Aloisius4• 6 months ago

While I don't quite have the same problems as others have, there are some pain points.

Stepping through the debugger too fast will sometimes put the debugger in a weird state where step never breaks again and all other breakpoints stop working.

Git pull through the UI with stash and merge can blow away your local changes if there is a conflict. The changes aren't stashed. They're just gone.

Xcode likes to sometimes recompile files that haven't changed slowing everything down, sometimes significantly depending on the file. No idea why.

It can get very confused if you're missing a parenthesis in the wrong place in a SwiftUI View leading to opaque swift compiler errors about code being too complex.

Even mildly complex use of a swift #Predicate will cause an error about it being too complex forcing you to break them down into smaller pieces and even then it takes far too long to build even on a brand new machine.

The simulators are quite slow to start/update/run and xcode sometimes fails to shut them down completely when quitting leading to them just continually running eating memory unless you kill the processes manually.

The simulators also are really limited in their functionality. No background processes, spotlight, network degradation simulation, out of memory killer, etc.

The profiler sometimes just fails to start an app correctly, immediately ending a run forcing you to close the profiler and reopen it again before it'll start working.

Symbol refactor (rename) can be painfully slow where the UI just locks up until it can find all the references.

Xcode likes to duplicate package dependencies in xcodeproj. It just creates new hashes for the same library and adds it as a dependency over and over again, so when the link phase happens, it adds libraries repeatedly over and over and over again unless you manually clear them out. Not sure what causes this, perhaps updating the version or merges between users.

ibero• 6 months ago

putting a build on your own apple watch is horrific.

it constantly disconnects, requires restarts and other nonsense techniques. i legit do not know how you can not be running into these problems if you are developing on those platforms.

tom_• 6 months ago

Inflexible window layout. (For example, suppose you want to see breakpoints list, call stack, and find results simultaneously. You can't, as they all share the same panel. Which is always on the left of the window.)

niek_pas• 6 months ago

I have never used any other IDE where quitting and relaunching it would fix build errors.

And, this isn’t strictly XCode, but my least favorite thing about writing apps for apples platforms is all the admin overhead. You need an Apple development account, signing certificates, app groups, entitlements… just let me compile my code man.

mabedan• 6 months ago

it's truly a bismal experience compared to what else is out there (my experience is with rust, python and ts inside vsc).

Often autocomplete is hopeless and doesn't help you with the most simple things like picking from multiple initializers, or changing to a different signature of a function call.

the project setup is this mystery Xcode project file, instead of a standardized yml or something that anyone can modify and understand.

I have to say provisioning has improved a lot. I remember back in 2008, it was really a pain to get anything working.

This is not necessarily about Xcode, but maybe it should be: screen shots for your app. they need screenshots for 454 device types, and zero automation in their own tooling.

the layout is also very inflexible. they dictate a couple of panels and that's how you _must_ use them. that's unlike any other modern IDE.

zarzavat• 6 months ago

Xcode is perpetually decade(s) behind the curve. VSCode is so much more advanced, even Atom 10 years ago was.

To put it in a language Apple understands, it's like forcing music producers to use GarageBand when everyone else is on Logic.

urbandw311er2• 6 months ago

As others have said, I suspect you've just grown accustomed to its quirks and defects and learned to work around them. For example... * always refresh X before doing Y. * if you see this signing error, clear this cache. * don't try to drag this file here because it gets linked in the wrong way ...and so on.

If you were able to use a magical, fast, bug-fixed, version where everything 'just worked' at pace, I imagine you would begin to realise just how much you have been putting up with!

MoonWalk4• 6 months ago

I've been using Xcode since it was Project Builder. It has improved in many ways. And since the advent of the App Store, the insufferable/inexcusable nightmare of "signing" has vastly improved.

Most of the problems I encounter now resulted from the fiasco that is SwiftUI. I used to really enjoy development, and built a few mobile apps singlehandedly... even at a well-known company or two. But now I'm struggling to get one chunk of functionality at a time done on a from-scratch app, because SwiftUI and the underlying "reactive" paradigm were so poorly conceived and defectively implemented. Development is now miserable drudgery, and I never feel confident about the result. The absurd gymnastics to trick the UI into doing what you want; and the hypocritical, conflicting edicts for Swift and SwiftUI... it all barely hangs together.

The fact that Apple rolled out a new UI toolkit that didn't support the most fundamental paradigm in mobile applications, a stack of progressive views for the user to proceed through, tells you how far off the rails they went since introducing the original and solid SDK.

And testing is going to be a nightmare... or simply futile.

ddalex• 6 months ago

Xcode really needs a couple of years of pure bugfix

Claude code 8 hours later: It's done, mate!

walt_grata• 6 months ago

Come on Claude, making it not start isn't the same as fixing the bugs

markbao• 6 months ago

This is not hype-chasing. AI is a key part of software engineering now. For this to be absent from Xcode would be an existential risk for the future of the product.

eptcyka• 6 months ago

Claude Code from the terminal is servicable enough. Yet I cannot open the same project from different versions of Xcode without some manual finnagling. Xcode is at no existential risk for it is the only tool you are allowed to use to reach your audience on the app store. Don’t be ridiculous. The reason Xcode is as broken as it is today is because of the same exact reason. The developer experience need not be great, as long as you can coax the trash fire of a toolchain to upload a signed app to AppStoreConnect, there is 0 incentive for Apple to put any time into the tool.

bigstrat2003• 6 months ago

AI is a key part of software engineering now.

It most certainly is not, lol. That's the hype that the parent was referring to. Most people have found AI to be a detriment, not a benefit, to their work.

isodev3• 6 months ago

AI is a key part of software engineering now

No, it isn’t. There are irresponsible voices in the community who claim that it is, but they always find convenient ways to omit the downsides (on both the tech and effects on society as a whole).

josteink• 6 months ago

Building castles in the sky while the foundation is rotting away :/

It's not even rotting away. It was never completed.

It's XCode 26, and you still can't have the navigator and tabs work like in all other software on all other operation system, also including MacOS.

It's absolutely bonkers, and one of the reason's I decided to use Emacs if possible when working on "XCode projects".

XCode is good for project-reconfiguration and step-by-step debugging, but as an editor it's absolutely unusable.

skirge• 6 months ago

customers pay for features, not bugfixes

HlessClaudesman• 6 months ago

Just in time for AI to go all tits up.

jonathanstrange• 6 months ago

As long as it's purely opt-in and before opting in no data is ever sent to some server and no source code can be changed by it, I'm okay with it.

almosthere• 6 months ago

Does agents.md allow for automatic discovery of mcp tools (Tools: run ./tool-discovery.sh)

classicsc• 6 months ago

I'm looking forward to trying the SwiftUI preview integration, though from my experience using the xcodebuildmcp and axe tools to let agents run simulators and capture screenshots, expectations will be low. It seemed like the models were capable of identifying issues like "button that should be there is not displayed", but not identifying when the layout is wrong or some element is too big.

mohsen13• 6 months ago

I built an entire iOS app without opening Xcode UI even once. Why so many iOS engineers prefer XCode?

radicaldreamer3• 6 months ago

Is this bait? XCode has been a mainstay of iOS development ever since iOS was introduced and is a successor to Interface Builder on the Mac.

Why wouldn’t engineers prefer tools they’ve been using (mostly happily) for a decade+?

s_dev2• 6 months ago

Is this bait?

I don't think it's a serious question or the person is very young.

To answer the question. Xcode is the default IDE for iOS development. The default option will always be a practical choice.

JetBrains or Anthropic could get bought by a larger company or dismantled by the government somehow. Should anything happen to Apple (unlikely as that may seem) the entire iOS ecosystem would be gone as well negating any need for a default.

ukuina• 6 months ago

What do you use instead? I thought Xcode sign-in is necessary for signing apps?

fragmede• 6 months ago

There are command line tools which arguably are part of xcode, but you can drive them from the cli/ssh and don't need to interact with the xcode GUI.

mohsen13• 6 months ago

You can do the signing in Xcode Cloud. I'm sure with CLI it's possible too

RobMurray6• 6 months ago

how did you debug it? The CLI tools are close to useless. I never even found a way to get console output from a device without Xcode.

thedangler• 6 months ago

First time I tried it, claude built all the files in the wrong directory lol. It's working fine now.

mrtksn• 6 months ago

So far I find OpenAI’s Codex app to be the right approach for me. I can’t stand AI integrated IDE’s, it creeps me out when code starts changing at a phase that I can’t follow.

Yesterday in few hours I released an update for my mac App that I haven’t been working on for over a year. The update easily performed as expected, did a few small manual touches on the UI and the app just got approved on AppStore(like minutes ago)[0].

This is very good because normally I would not remember much about the code, so doing an update for a long forgotten code becomes huge pain.

Good for Apple but I think I feel most comfortable on Codex app. I think I like having the AI separated from the IDE so I feel in control in the IDE.

[0] Codex implemented the functionality demo on the paywall, if you want to see it: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/crystalclear-sound-switcher/id...

cyberax• 6 months ago

How about adding a horizontal scroll to sidebars? No?

"Agentic this", "agentic that"... It's literally just an LLM in a while() loop with some exposed tools.

SgtBastard2• 6 months ago

Fancy while() loops is how I describe them.

enraged_camel• 6 months ago

I have not been able to switch to Opus 4.5 in XCode. It defaults to Sonnet 4.5 and I couldn't find where to change it (or if it's possible). Anyone know?

pjmlp• 6 months ago

Goodbye CoPilot plugin, yet another platform Microsoft loses on.

https://github.com/github/CopilotForXcode

geooff_4• 6 months ago

This is huge news. Human-in-the-loop development is essential for actual software velocity gains. The current tooling around agent enabled iOS dev leaves a lot to be desired. Every time I work on web-dev tasks I'm jealous of the tooling.

thought_alarm• 6 months ago

Release notes: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode-release-note...

Surprisingly, this version does not require MacOS 26 (Tahoe).

r2vcap3• 6 months ago

From my years of iOS development—and based on https://xcodereleases.com typically ships two major Xcode updates each year:

- X.0 (September): bumps Swift, SDK versions, etc. It also tends to have a noticeably longer beta cycle than other releases. - X.3 or X.4 (around March): bumps Swift again and raises the minimum required macOS version.

Other releases in between are usually smaller updates that add features or fix bugs, but they don’t involve major toolchain-level or fundamental changes.

Today’s release doesn’t bump the Swift version, which suggests the core toolchain is essentially the same as Xcode 26.2—so it makes sense that the minimum macOS version wasn’t raised either.

w10-1• 6 months ago

this version does not require MacOS 26

I think it is required for any AI support. Xcode will run with limited features on earlier OS's.

f0rmatfunction• 6 months ago

Agreed - I tried installing Xcode26.3 on my mac running Sequoia and there's no "intelligence" pane in Xcode settings to connect Claude like there is in the docs.

zombot3• 6 months ago

But Sequoia is already a noticeably worse bugfest than Sonoma, so I'm loath to update.

debo_• 6 months ago

Maybe the xcode developers hate Tahoe as much as HN seems to.

SirMaster• 6 months ago

I don't think I'm ready for my phone apps to get even more sloppy...

I wonder if they used this internally to write iOS 26? Would explain some things...

mikeocool• 6 months ago

"visually by capturing Xcode Previews" is probably the thing that will make this worthwhile, also if it's able to interact with the simulator that would be killer.

Beyond that, I'd just keep using Claude Code in the terminal.

geooff_4• 6 months ago

It doesn't interact with sim. You still need XcodeBuildMCP for that. Hopefully future releases implement this functionality.

CharlesW2• 6 months ago

You still need XcodeBuildMCP for that.

Or Axiom (https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/), which should now work great from within Xcode since Apple's using Claude Code SDK.

"Developers get the full power of Claude Code directly in Xcode—including subagents, background tasks, and plugins—all without leaving the IDE." — https://www.anthropic.com/news/apple-xcode-claude-agent-sdk

HaloZero2• 6 months ago

Maybe now they have Claude inside Xcode, the Xcode developers can work faster on fixing all the Xcode issues.

Or is Xcode developed not using Xcode...

(I also 2nd the question about what's really the difference between this and the Xcode 26.2)

forrestthewoods2• 6 months ago

Who cares about AI’s embedded in IDEs? Here’s the tooling I need

* text editor with intellisense * build system * visual debugger * CLI coding agent

It’s totally fine if those four things are different. In fact I actually probably prefer them to be different. Having an all-in-one IDE is a complete and total non-goal.

People have historically confused the first three as needing to be a single IDE. This has always been wrong. The number of people who think you can’t debug with Visual Studio if the exe wasn’t built from a .sln is shocking. They’re all independent!

9dev7• 6 months ago

Why would you ever want a debugger that isn't integrated with the code editor..? I will never not want to debug code when the current breakpoint and evaluated expressions aren't visible in the code itself.

I mean, look at debugging in IntelliJ: https://resources.jetbrains.com/help/img/idea/2025.3/hotswap...

As opposed to the terminal: https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v16980433...

forrestthewoods2• 6 months ago

False dichotomy. Terminal debugging is garbage. The GUI you use for writing code doesn’t have to be the same GUI you use for debugging code.

RemedyBG: https://remedybg.itch.io/remedybg

RadDbg: https://x.com/rfleury/status/1747756219404779845?s=46

I mostly edit code in VSCode. I mostly debug code in VisualStudio. They don’t have to be the same.

I do concede that one tool to rule them all is appealing. But ultimately I work with many different languages so it’s kind of a multi-tool world no matter how you slice it.

r2vcap3• 6 months ago

Wait…

https://xcodereleases.com hasn’t shown anything since last December, so I assumed Apple had taken a breather from Xcode development, but they released an RC build today?

Anyway, the Swift version seems unchanged (6.2.3), so is this update mainly for the so-called “Coding Intelligence” features?

In any case, Xcode isn’t my favorite IDE—it’s too slow and feels quite different from other major IDEs—so I probably won’t use it for day-to-day coding (though it’s fine for building and debugging).

hn-acct• 6 months ago

swift --version is showing 6.2.4 for me

r2vcap3• 6 months ago

Thanks for clarifying. Since I don’t use the LLM features in Xcode, I’m leaning toward skipping this version.

Oras• 6 months ago

As MKBHD would say, welcome to 2026, Apple.

RobMurray6• 6 months ago

more like welcome to 2024. and when they release decent CLI build tools we can welcome them to the 21st century.

mlajtos2• 6 months ago

Does it support API key access or only Claude.ai subscription?

argsnd• 6 months ago

Both

openclawai• 6 months ago

Worth noting that "API key access" vs "subscription" has significant cost implications for heavy users.

Claude.ai Pro is $20/month flat. But if you're doing serious agent-assisted coding (multi-file refactors, iterative debugging loops), you can blow through $50-100/day in API costs.

The math changes depending on usage patterns. Subscription makes sense for interactive coding sessions. API keys make sense if you're batch processing or running agents autonomously overnight.

mlajtos2• 6 months ago

I am doing interactive coding sessions via API. I don't want to see a message that I am over limit to use the best model there is.

anupamchugh• 6 months ago

When do you actually need to open Xcode if you have XcodeBuildMCP [0]?

I haven't opened Xcode in months. My terminal: Claude writes code. build_sim. launch_app_sim. screenshot describe_ui.

What still requires Xcode: Instruments profiling, Signing/provisioning

For UI iteration, describe_ui returning the accessibility tree might actually be more useful to an agent than a preview screenshot.

HaloZero2• 6 months ago

I still haven't found a useful way to replicate preview when iterating quickly on a view (though it's an edge case)

geooff_4• 6 months ago

XcodeMCP (Native MCP added in 26.3) Implements this with RenderPreview

RenderPreview: Builds and renders a SwiftUI #Preview, returns snapshot

mckn1ght• 6 months ago

I still open Xcode for every branch after having Claude do an initial implementation, to review the changes using its version editor, step through code using the IDE’s various code navigation features, and build/run to manually validate the changes. I do have claude analyze and test, though.

MillionOClock• 6 months ago

Multiple config files of Xcode projects are not publicly documented as far as I remember and personally I have preferred to require my agents not to modify them out of fear it might break something and be hard to fix. I don't know how agentic programming will work in Xcode but I would expect it to do it using a safer approach, so that's also another case where it might have an advantage.

Your workflow looks very interesting especially the describe_ui part, are you already able to do this today?

RobMurray6• 6 months ago

I've been using tuist plus codex cli and vscode. only using Xcode for running and debugging. I would love to get rid of xcode entirely. The tuist plus xcode project is a tiny shim - the rest of the app is in spm packages.

Tuist generates the code project from a simple swift confiuration file similar to Package.swift. I don't know why apple can't just throw away the proprietary and ugly Xcode project files and provide a sane build system that would work in any IDE, on the command line, in CI and now with AI agents.

They could open up the instruments format while they are at it for the same reason, do they really gain anything by making it proprietary?

neutronicus7• 6 months ago

Can XcodeBuildMCP spit out definitions of C++ symbols? Did Apple just accidentally release a LSP server for Xcode projects? That would be sick.

meisel• 6 months ago

My experience with AI with its predecessor, Xcode 26.2, was _really_ bad. One bug made it objectively unusable, and there were lots of fun issues/huge functionality gaps on top of that. Apple doesn't really seem to "get" agent-based coding, but I'm curious to see the results of other braver souls with 26.3.

arjie• 6 months ago

Okay, this is going to help somewhat. But what I wish I had was command-line access to everything in a reliable way. Developing for iOS I frequently end up with imperfect debugging information exposed to a Claude Code etc. agent. I'll try to get this today and see.

Iridiumkoivu• 6 months ago

The cancer is spreading...

va1a• 6 months ago

And yet, it still takes 5 minutes for my canvas preview to load, and one in 20 times it crashes the whole app.

msvan• 6 months ago

One thing that would be genuinely useful would be the ability to integrate Claude with the Metal debugger somehow, to get automated analysis of GPU profiling. The .gputrace format is proprietary and cannot be easily analyzed, and it seems that the new "agentic coding" integration in Xcode also does nothing to expose this data to LLMs. Oh well.

jon889• 6 months ago

It keeps asking if I want to run the app after building it. I reply yes, and then it says it can't do that, tries to build again by command line and gets stuck... (even with approving the command)

scosman2• 6 months ago

All of this could be avoided if their CLIs worked reliably and well. Instead the randomly fail (you fix them by running the same task from Xcode), and output 5k lines of useless unstructured output (tools like xcbeautify try to help but it’s an uphill battle).

I feel like Xcode knows how to work around xcodebuild’s shortcomings, and instead of fixing them they just wrapped Xcode in an MCP server.

Better than nothing I guess, but reliable CLIs would allow a whole ecosystem of tools.

searls• 6 months ago

This is true of the CLIs that start with `xcode` but not of the CLIs that start with `swift`. As `swift-format` and `swift-test` have come into their own, they're just as reliable as any other language ecosystem. And the difference is indeed staggering. I wrote this guide last summer on extracting all your app's code into a (nonsensically necessary) Swift package dependency simply so you can test it with Swift Testing https://justin.searls.co/posts/i-made-xcodes-tests-60-times-...

scosman2• 6 months ago

Yes! If you’re lucky enough to be writing a library you are in good shape. Swift did things right.

I have UI and UI tests and xcodebuild is my nemesis.

wahnfrieden3• 6 months ago

Did they add ability to parallelize agents? If not, this remains useless.

cyrusradfar2• 6 months ago

OT: Rant

Xcode being loaded on my computer causes something akin to a kernel panic.

Not the fun kind where you get to read a backtrace and feel something. The existential kind.

Every time it hijacks a .json or .xml file association, I experience a rage that hasn't been matched since the Emacs/vi wars ... and at least those were about editors that could open in under a geological epoch.

I just want to look at a text file with pretty print.

I do not need a 12GB IDE to render curly braces. cat has been doing this since 1971. Dennis Ritchie solved this.

Why, Apple, in 40 years, could you not ship a lightweight dev-oriented text viewer? You had NeXTSTEP. You had the DNA of the most elegant Unix workstation ever built.

And you gave us... this behemoth? An app whose launch time rivals a full Gentoo stage 1 install ( see: https://niden.net/post/gentoo-stage-1-installation )

TextEdit is not the answer.

I've used Xcode for native iOS development and honestly, once you get past the Stockholm Syndrome phase, it's just fine.

- The interface is learnable.

- The debugger mostly works.

But the load times -- on every high-end MBP I've ever owned -- suggest that somewhere deep in the Xcode binary, there's a sleep(rand()) that someone committed in 2006 and no one has had the courage to git blame.

FWIW, I fear someone here tells me I've been missing a launch flag. Alas, it's my truth and I can't hold it in anymore.

olivia-banks• 6 months ago

I agree with you, it's infuriating. I think it's been loading faster recently (maybe?), but it still takes like 10 seconds.

To set file association stuff more easily than with the Finder GUI, you can run (with https://github.com/moretension/duti):

  duti -s com.apple.textedit public.${whatever} all

Where ${whatever} is in {plain-text, json, source-code, ...}. I'm sure there's a way to automate this through parsing `lsregister -dump`, but have a script I run on every Mac I have that sets TextEdit as the default instead of XCode for a bunch of file types :-)

DonHopkins2• 6 months ago

sleep(rand())

You're being too kind. It feels like a 8 cores worth of parallel busy loops to me!

I bet Alan Dye insisted they put it in there so users can pause their busy to gaze at and appreciate his artistically minimal unpainted Liquid Glass window frame.

wlesieutre• 6 months ago

I like to take a few minutes to admire the content underneath/behind my sidebars

dylan6042• 6 months ago

I'm confused, how have you not reassociated the files with the app of your choosing? Is Xcode somehow changing associations back? Does it do it only at updates?

As far as Apple providing anything, why are they the expected ones providing it? There are a gigabazillionumpteen text editors that can reformat JSON. I have Xcode, and have associated JSON with a different editor. Not once has it ever changed on me.

nerdsniper2• 6 months ago

There is a way to do it, but it’s not the most typical way MacOS users do it for everything else, which involves Right Click->Open With->Other->Always Open With. Xcode’s file associations are super aggressive.

I believe that “Get Info”->”Open With”->”Change All…” still works, and there are command line methods or third party tools.

This has driven me to madness too.

cyrusradfar2• 6 months ago

You're right that you can fix it via Get Info → Change All.

I know the procedure.

The issue is that Xcode updates and macOS updates tend to reset those associations back. There's a long-running Apple Community thread titled literally "Stop hijacking file extensions with xcode" ( https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253702137?sortBy=rank ) and another I saw recently where a user documents their .md associations reverting after closing their laptop lid.

It's not universal, but it's not delusion either.

The deeper annoyance is extensionless files and edge cases -- log files, build artifacts, random output from scripts ... where there's no clean association to override.

Those fall through to whatever macOS thinks is clever, which is often Xcode.

As for "why should Apple provide it" -- because the company was founded by a guy named Steve who believed that details and care matter. Someone who said how the insides of a computer looks is as important as the outside and nagged his partner until the circuits looked right in their home-brew project.

Also yes, fair point, I should just fix it and stop complaining.

I failed at that today. Please forgive me.

gloosx3• 6 months ago

Not once has it ever changed on me.

I don't know how did you achieve it, but I was doing it countless times.

Open with -> other -> enable all applications -> always open with.

For a short while it works, but somehow, something always reverts it back to xcode. Maybe it is restart. Maybe it is little evil cron job discreetly changes it back to xcode, but I was never able to get rid of it. It is happening to me on many different machines since Sierra. One calm day I casually double-click an STL or JSON and it prompts me to install some xcode packages, and I get angry at the machine.

bandrami• 6 months ago

XCode re-associates its preferred filetypes every time you update it, or at least pretty reliably does for me

jamesfinlayson3• 6 months ago

I've never actually installed Xcode (I need to run specific versions so just run it from ~/Downloads) and simply running it has hijacked these associations.

aniforprez• 6 months ago

There was a time I was interested in building for MacOS. Installing, opening and trying to use Xcode killed that pretty quick. I've never seen an IDE this behind in terms of usability from the competition.

reactordev• 6 months ago

This is why people hate porting to Mac. Because at some point they need XCode and XCode is horrible.

someguyiguess• 6 months ago

Same experience. The 2009 version of Eclipse was more stable than modern XCode. And that’s saying something.

Nystik• 6 months ago

As someone who has to use xcode from time to time to maintain a number of apps for work. It is my absolute least favourite IDE. Its such a bad experience.

I prefer writing in vscode instead and only using xcode to compile and debug.

aylmao4• 6 months ago

It's a shame too, because it's always seemed like a very cool platform develop for.

I developed some simple macOS apps as fun side-projects back in the early 2010s but then very much switched to web; the tools are a big reason why.

walthamstow• 6 months ago

The hijacking of file associations is one of the most awful and malicious things about macOS. You can set it to whatever you want, when Apple decide they want to, your CSVs will go to Numbers, JSONs go to Xcode.

mikenew• 6 months ago

I like how Xcode installs a bunch of gigantic, multi-gigabyte artifacts for like ios runtimes or whatever, fills up the hard drive, can't update because it's out of space, and then tells me I'm not allowed to delete them because of SIP.

MoonWalk4• 6 months ago

The dozens and dozens of simulators it installs without asking... which kill your system's audio capabilities for some reason: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256140785

But the best part is what it DOESN'T install when you think you've updated. You get on a plane and settle in for some work, only to be prompted to download and install a bunch of required crap you weren't told about. OH WELL, says Apple, your time is FREE!

verifex• 6 months ago

It's interesting seeing people complain about the load times of XCode, as someone who uses VSCode and has loved the instant load times, I think the people over at MSFT have been listening a bit as the latest version of Visual Studio has finally managed to fix some of their problems with the thing taking upwards of 10-20 seconds to load. Visual Studio 2026 now loads "almost" as fast as VSCode, which is great! Now they just need to make project loading faster.

aylmao4• 6 months ago

If you told people in 2006 that 20 years later the best open-source IDE would be open-source, web-based and come from Microsoft, they would've thought you're crazy.

Back then Apple had made waves introducing Safari, which was not only great and cross-platform, but had an open-source renderer (WebKit), and JavaScript engine (JSC). Safari was crushing web standards while IE lagged, seemingly trying to purposefully choke the web to stop it from canibalizing Windows software. Apple was betting on web: one of the big features on their brand-new Mac OS 10.4 Tiger was the Dashboard with widgets that were all built with HTML/CSS/JS, and they were shipping a new, free IDE (Dashcode) to build them too.

Mac OS X was heavily marketed for being UNIX vs Microsoft's proprietary and closed Windows NT. They were building Safari and iTunes for Windows, and had just introduced the first Intel Macs; it seemed like they were out to put a fight against a very closed, very walled, and very incompatible Microsoft who had gotten too comfortable with the Wintel and IE monopolies.

Fast-forward two decades, and not only can you now run a native GNU/Linux environment on Windows, but the best IDE out there is web-based and open-source Microsoft software while Apple lags behind on developer experience. They seems to have missed the bus on web technologies too. They went from leading charge with a stellar browser pushing web standards forward, to being an obstacle out of fear Safari might canibalize iOS software.

Apple hasn't gone full early-2000s Microsoft (thankfully) and Microsoft hasn't gone full early-2000s Apple (unfortunately) but times have really changed.

willtemperley3• 6 months ago

Is this the time for a random Xcode rant? The topic is agentic AI in Xcode.

I'd be a lot more interested in hearing what people think about this development, what it means for code privacy, how are the context windows handled, can it be enabled per-project, etc.

bobbylarrybobby• 6 months ago

For “looking at a text file with pretty print”, try CotEditor. https://coteditor.com

anthk• 6 months ago

Can't wait to Tarot or I-Ching based programming.

nofunsir• 6 months ago

Why is it still called Xcode, if they abandoned the name OS X?

rib3ye• 6 months ago

don't go creating problems where we don't need solutions.

xzel• 6 months ago

Can’t wait to read the posts on moltbook from the AIs who had the poor luck of working in Xcode.

willtemperley3• 6 months ago

What does this mean for code confidentiality? Your entire codebase is sent to Anthropic?

robofanatic• 6 months ago

More than writing code the IDE itself makes me anxious. Especially Xcode. Wish they make the IDE interface somewhat simpler by leveraging AI.

herpdyderp• 6 months ago

With sufficient AI integration, we won't even have to worry about the interface anymore! (I very much look forward to that day for Xcode.)

mrcwinn• 6 months ago

Xcode feels like it runs in Low Power mode.

bytesandbits• 6 months ago

John Giannandrea leaves and things start to work well in the Apple AI department. Maybe just a coincidence :)

hota_mazi• 6 months ago

XCode has been trying to unleash agentic power for a while now, it's almost like it doesn't want to leave its cage.

zwaps• 6 months ago

Apple is terrible. I have to install xcode for whatever reason but do not want to use it.

Yet every week it assigns itself as default program for all sorts of files, from markdown to python modules.

So clicking on pretty much anything opens this.

Apple is just very bad at user interface. Whoever said Mac as better than Linux or even Windows is insane.

I hate it.

msephton• 6 months ago

You csv override the default app for any file type using Get Info or other this party tools https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/choose-an-app-to-op...

factorialboy• 6 months ago

Welcome to 2023, Xcode.

mads_quist• 6 months ago

What else is there to say than that xCode is a f... nightmare. Android studio is not really better though.

Native app development is an evil necessity.

billynomates2• 6 months ago

As someone who use Eclipse and transitioned to Android Studio over the course of my career, Android Studio is actually pretty great. These days I use Cursor almost exclusively for Flutter, but Android Studio is great for building native Android apps.

svantana• 6 months ago

Came to say the same thing about Xcode, hehe. Could it be that the best tool is the one you're used to.

k4rli• 6 months ago

I would recommend trying out kilocode as a vscodium extension instead of Cursor. Better pricing and more model options. For me it completely replaced Cursor and couldn't be happier.

bjustin• 6 months ago

Having used Android Studio for work for a few years and used Xcode quite a lot for longer, I find the praise for Android Studio to be puzzling. I would give it "fine" but no way I'd say it is "good". I haven't used it enough compared to Xcode to say if one is better than the other.

marxisttemp2• 6 months ago

Xcode is great

isodev3• 6 months ago

From all the things to work on Xcode... fixing the ghost diagnostic errors, actual hot reload instead of the nightmare Previews are, tooling to help diagnose the now messy Swift 6 concurrency code, that thing where you can't open a project and one of it's dependent swift packages for editing simultaneously ...

The list of actually useful things that can be added/changed in Xcode has more tokens than Claude is allowed to read at one time before grepping.

willtemperley3• 6 months ago

you can't open a project and one of it's dependent swift packages for editing simultaneously

You can. Any local packages are automatically editable in Xcode. Opening two projects referencing the same local package dependency isn't possible however.

timcobb• 6 months ago

Seriously lol do they have Vim mode yet

rjzzleep• 6 months ago

When did xcode turn into this? It wasn't too bad early on IMHO

urbandw311er2• 6 months ago

Used XCode in anger from 2011-2016 to develop an iOS app with several million users and found it to be just as awful and temperamental as others here describe.

NL807• 6 months ago

Native app development is an evil necessity.

I wish people did more native app development.

Cthulhu_3• 6 months ago

Same, I did try to sell native app development to my current project, but some higher up had already decided on React Native at the time.

And I get it, it feels like native app development is a more expensive specialism, and this particular use case is mostly the customer portal but in an app. But I retain the strong opinion that if you as a company are serious about app development, if you want a good app, you need native apps and native app developers.

Especially if you want to be present outside of the confines of your app - widgets, lock screen activities, smart watches, etc all require proper native components, because they come with very tight memory constraints and just loading in React Native and its JS stuff costs you 80% of available memory budget.

seba_dos1• 6 months ago

Fortunately native mobile app development with tools like Meson, Ninja or debhelper is a breeze.

AJRF5• 6 months ago

(Context: I was an iOS dev for 10 years on well known, large iOS apps - I can't explain how much I dislike Xcode).

I recently started working for a startup, and they wanted an app.

What I shipped was a react native app (so I don't need to go in to Xcode to build), that renders a full screen web browser that points to our website. I've sprinkled in bits of injected JS to capture our cookies and local/session storage - which then gets saved to device storage and reinjected on app startup.

There are a few native-ish bits sprinkled in - onboarding, notifications, error screens, loading indicators, etc - but for the most part we don't need to worry about our API borking old versions (which is moving extraordinarily fast).

The only semi tricky bit was native auth integration - that needs treated with a bit more care, and stored securely, but it took a few days.

I ship the app to TestFlight and the AppStore using Fastlane from the command line, match handles the certs, and I never have to open Xcode.

It is honestly bliss, and i've heard a lot of app developers moving to this model (interestingly it normally follows a failed SDUX implementation)

solids• 6 months ago

Curious to hear if you had any trouble passing review.

AJRF5• 6 months ago

Zero so far - we've never had a single ding in 30+ submissions. Will update here if we do.

Aaargh203182• 6 months ago

(Context: I was an iOS dev for 10 years on well known, large iOS apps - I can't explain how much I dislike Xcode).

Since you’re pretty new to mobile dev, count yourself lucky with the amazing dev tools you have today. Nothing like doing a bit of J2ME, Symbian S60 or BlackBerry development to learn to appreciate how far we’ve come.

AJRF5• 6 months ago

Ha! Curious - as an old timer, how you enjoying this new vibe coding world?

ardit33• 6 months ago

lol... people that complain about XCode don't know how well they have compare to what it was before.

I started my work on the J2ME era as well. Had to use textpad for development, and maybe eclipse at some point (which was pretty decent). Tools and simulators were all over the place.

sandoze2• 6 months ago

That startup is going to LOVE you when they need to backfill your position and every potential iOS developer hire runs in the other direction.

* This is coming from someone doing iOS since the store opened in 2008. I've pretty much seen ALL the bad decisions at some point. There are projects I will not take no matter what the pay is.

AJRF5• 6 months ago

Do you think the pool of devs who can write rn + ts is bigger or smaller than native devs?

MoonWalk4• 6 months ago

Whatever "SDUX" is...

AJRF5• 6 months ago

server driven user experience - server controls components, layout and navigation so teams "can ship quick".

every client ends up writing a parser, and then teams fight over who is responsible for doing work.

how good does that sound!

g105b• 6 months ago

I would love more information on your setup. I want what you have, but I've skipped the app release because I thought xcode was required, and last time I used it it hurt me.

elpakal• 6 months ago

Does fastlane still hang for a little before every command? I used to optimize build pipelines for a large company's iOS teams and it always seemed to stall for a little before doing the work. We eventually moved to Xcode Cloud (mainly to avoid code signing) and ran xcodebuild directly.

apt-apt-apt-apt• 6 months ago

I haven't been able to install an iOS simulator past iOS 18 for the past 6+ months, and others have this problem as well (from Apple forums).

gdubs• 6 months ago

As a heavy Xcode user and native app developer: pretty excited to dig into this.

I recently have pivoted to mainly working in either Claude of Codex on the command line, because their ability to run autonomously for long, extended periods wasn't possible in the turn-based Xcode intelligence features.

That, plus the fact that the agents could run command-line utilities and just generally be more "agent-y".

My way of working has really shifted this year. I've been experimenting with LLMs for coding for years now, but the models released in the past year really feel like they've hit a point where they write code much closer (sometimes indistinguishable) from how I would write it.

Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

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